Matthew Hussey: 

It is not just in your head. Modern dating has become increasingly difficult. There is data that shows that almost 50% of women aged 25 to 44 will be single by 2030, says the Morgan Stanley data, which didn’t say anything about how many men will be single by 2030. But let’s ignore that slightly sexist statistic. Other data shows that fewer young adults are having sex now, and that many have just given up on dating entirely.

Some men are turning their frustrations into looks maxing, a particularly nihilistic trend, and many women are opting out from dating altogether. The frustrations of modern dating are unlike any other generation prior, because even though ghosting, cheating, lying, manipulation, heartbreak, and lots of other terrible things have always existed. We are the first generation to experience them at the scale we do.

Thank you dating apps. The result is twofold. Dating feels broken and we feel burned out. But I want to present you with a surprising theory today that dating being broken isn’t the real threat to your love life. Your burnout is. For those of you that don’t know me, I’m Matthew Hussey. I have been a coach for almost 20 years.

I’ve written two New York Times bestsellers in the category of Love and Relationships. Subscribe, like this video and stick around until the end. Because I have a really unique opportunity for you to get a solution to all of this. Today, there is an unprecedented amount of dating advice out there in the form of TikToks, YouTube videos, podcasts, and books, all with their own take on where you might be going wrong.

And yet, for many of us, the advice only adds confusion and resentment that exacerbates our burnout. Burnout can come in in a number of ways, from trying every possible solution under the sun to your love life, and still cycling through wrong person off the wrong person, to getting fixated on one person who has the special ability to burn us out all on their own.

Or in the case of one of my weekly viewers, Kimberly, it could be both. She said I have tried to date and to no avail. Nothing. Also, the man I met one and a half years ago has tortured me more with his ghosting, gaslighting, and stonewalling. Now I am just burnt out and just over dating. I am going to break this video down into three sections on why burnout is the single biggest threat to your love life, and what you can do about each of them.

Number one, we are always on the defensive when we’ve been hurt or disappointed enough times, it eventually begins to take a toll the next time we find someone not texting us back. Our fears are on a hair trigger response and our guard goes up quicker. This is especially true when, because of the lack of good options in our dating life, we haven’t met anyone we like in years and so we’re terrified of losing them.

The problem with this reaction is that it has us going in, eye-squinted, trying to protect ourselves from what could happen. We try and stop ourselves from saying the wrong thing, and this one ends up showcasing the least impressive version of ourselves. Enter, Guy Winch, a widely known psychologist and author of multiple books on healing, heartbreak and now burnout.

I wanted to sit down with Guy and see if we could work out how to help people who felt like they were on the back foot because of dating burnout. As he points out in his book, The psychology actually points to the fact that if you go into a situation excited about the impact you’re going to make a much more powerful version of you will show up.

Guy Winch:

“If you go in trying to avert avoid disaster, trying to avoid putting a foot wrong. If you’re focused on I don’t want to put the foot wrong, then you’ll focus on not failing. And not failing is very, very different than succeeding.”

Matthew Hussey:

I find this advice really empowering because I can remember times in my life when I was so dejected by a string of failures, or the feeling that I was on a losing streak, that my whole mindset became incredibly negative and jaded when I was then going into a different opportunity.

But no matter what it is in life, we always want to go in to make an impact because as I always remind people, it only takes one. Whether it’s in business or in dating, you are one impactful move away from changing everything. We can’t go into a date trying not to turn someone off. We have to go in to make an impact.

So I asked Guy how he would practically apply this mindset to going on a date.

Guy Winch:

“Preparation matters and preparation here involves both physical and psychological. If you go into the date feeling prepared. So figure out what you’re going to wear. Figure out, you know, a couple of topics of conversation that you want to bring up that you know are interesting.

If you know you’re going to meet at this coffee shop or you’re going to go for a walk. Scout out the location. It’s not important to scout out the location for you to know something about the location. It’s important because it would make you feel more confident. And because these small steps that you’re taking are giving you a sense of control over an unknown situation.

So I went to the coffee shop. I know how that operates. Now I know it. And you know it’s a good place to sit and oh, I that I went because that place has a lot of cobblestones. So I have to think about a different level of heel than what I was thinking about or whatever the thing is.

In other words, anything that you can do to feel more prepared again, that’s a psychological feeling. You know, control is a psychological feeling. You just need to do the actions that make you feel like, oh, I check that box I prepared. I’ve done everything I can. I can’t prepare in terms of I don’t know what they’re going to say, I don’t know how they’re going to react, etc. but I can, you know, I can do what I can do.

That’s going to be really, really helpful.”

Matthew Hussey:

By the way, if you do have a date coming up and you are nervous about it or anything else going on for you right now, I can coach you through that using Matthew AI right now at AskMH.com. You even get some free questions if you’ve never used it before. So go check that out. Please, before you do anything else.

The bottom line here if you are focused on not failing and not getting ghosted and not feeling rejected and not being lied to and not meeting another married person, you will eventually end up hiding the version of yourself that is the most likely to attract someone. The second issue with burnout is it puts us in sell mode instead of buying mode.

Dating today feels fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it. You might go on a date thinking, if I don’t get this person to go on a second date with me, they’re going to go home tonight and match with someone better. When dating moved slower when not everyone was on the apps, you felt like you had more runway to make an impression and that you weren’t going to lose them to another option before you even had a chance to make a great impression.

When we feel this at the mercy of an external pace and someone else’s decisions, we obsess over doing everything right. We’re not looking at them anymore, or whether this is the kind of person that can meet our core needs, because the whole thing has got us thinking about ourselves and whether we are doing a good enough job. We start treating dates as a performance designed to lock down another date.

One of the answers lies in taking some of that focus off of ourselves and putting it on them.

Guy Winch:

Interviewing them too. If you are that focused on whether they want me, you are not focused on whether you want them, and the idea of focusing on whether you want them, on whether this date is appealing to you, whether they seem interesting, whether they’re saying things that you consider intelligent, you know, etc. the minute you’re assessing them, you are in your head.

In other words, you are less worthy. And whatever the, the, the worries are and you’re thinking more, you’re analyzing more. So you’re actually trying to pay attention. Pivot what the task is before you. The task is not to go and put on a show. The task is to go and be yourself as much as possible. But pay attention to who they are.

Matthew Hussey:

The chaos of online dating and endless options can make us feel that we have to try really hard to stand out. But don’t forget that you are not simply a solo performance on a date. You are trying to get to know them too. It’s a dance now. It’s not easy to focus on being intentional in this way when it feels like things are moving at hyper speed, which is one of the many reasons that dating feels broken today.

But remember, confidence moves at its own pace. Confidence sets the pace. So if you’re worried about how you’re coming across, you are liable to miss the ways that they are coming up short. Like the fact that they just reached out after two days of no contact to say.

“Yeah.”

The third dangerous problem with dating burn out is that it has a cynically disqualifying people. There is so much frustration right now from people who are so worn out by the process of dating, from how little they’re getting from somebody else, or how much other people are not even willing to try. Or the people who are willing to try are just strange or crazy, or they’re not people that they’re attracted to.

One of the hallmark reactions to this level of frustration is that we start becoming incredibly harsh critics of early behavior in an effort to protect ourselves. Last week, I did a video on how coffee dates were now seen by many to be an instant turnoff. And if a guy offers to take you on a coffee date, it is grounds for immediate disqualification.

But I also understand that some of this early disqualification is a reaction to pain. The pain of people just not trying anymore. The pain of dealing with people who want the highest possible return for the minimum possible investment. So I asked Guy what he thought was a better way to achieve the result of not burning out on people who are not trying without mistakenly filtering out people who are great to soon.

Guy Winch:

This is dating burning, but burnout does is, you know, fatigue, exhaustion, impatience, other symptoms. But so is cynicism. So is it just a cynicism about what you do, about the process, about what’s happening? And if these women are like, no, I’m not going to go just for a coffee date, that shows a lack of investment to somebody who’s never met me before or they’re not showing up enough, you know, like they want to split the thing.

Do you know the financial situation? What if they’re the loveliest person, but they literally can’t afford that right now? And then maybe on a third date they’ll want to pay. But unless you know what their financial situation is. Then, you know, and if you have that level of cynicism, it might be well earned. It might be that you’ve been doing this enough that you just, you know, you have every right to feel that way.

But what I’m saying is that is bleeding over. In the same way we do not contain burnout. Everyone around us outside of work knows it because we’re not ourselves. We’re not joyful. We’re not ourselves. We’re cynical, we’re impatient and miserable. We’re apt to interpret in the negative. We’re apt to have like a, you know, the shorter, you know, responses to be more irritable, to be less patience, to be less forgiving.

We’re apt to perceive things in a harsher way. And so that’s the burnout that you’re feeling. And maybe, again, super warranted.

Matthew Hussey:

There is literally advice today that tells us to break it off with someone immediately if they do so much as use a cliche in one of their early messages with us, it cannot be productive to disqualify people this quickly based on something that we don’t know is a one off or a pattern.

Until we spend time with someone, we won’t know if they’re capable of original thought I haven’t listened to this one yet. I don’t think I will. The artwork is so passé.

Guy Winch:

Takes a long time to truly get to know someone I know nothing about five dates or ten dates. I believe it takes a calendar year. You want to see them through all the holidays.

You want to see what they like around their parents, what they like around their friends, what the how they travel, how they argue, how what the, how they do when they’re not well, you know, some people they dislike this cold and they’re like, oh my goodness, they became a ten year old, you know, like you never know. So it takes a long time to get to know someone.

Matthew Hussey:

Okay. So how do we know what we should pay attention to. What would be the things that you would say? Like the being rude to the waiter that do qualify as cut and run because it’s not worth giving this person Christmas and New Year.

Guy Winch:

It’s a long list. But you know the list because it makes you it kind of tells you a little bit cold and it things are going fine. And suddenly you have an old reaction, a cringe reaction. Not, not. And for false reasons, but you cringe because, you know, like, they, they, they driving somewhere and suddenly they unleashed some road rage that was just like, unbelievable in an unwanted way. Or they’re talking about someone and it’s so unkind and it’s so judgmental or like, you know, that certain things that like you wouldn’t do once, but with all those things, unless it’s truly critical, with all those things I also believe in give them a chance to correct, even with the waiter.

Like maybe they didn’t even realize, like say to them like, wow, that was a little rude to the waiter. And they that gives them an opportunity to say like, oh goodness, you’re right. I’m so sorry. I’ve been so focused. I just felt like they were intruding when were having such a great conversation. So I got annoyed with them.

But you’re absolutely right. I’m usually lovely to myself. Let me go apologize to the person suddenly like, oh, hello. That’s okay. So give it– Or they might look at you like, so what, they’re just a waiter, in which case is they check please or if we go.

Matthew Hussey:

An interesting point about all of this is that both people who fall too fast for someone and people who judge and criticize people too fast are, in a way, falling prey to the same trap.

They are both assessing someone too quickly, which usually comes from an emotionally reactive place. In fact, everything that we have talked about here today, from going into dating, scared and defensive to anxiously trying to prove ourselves to someone instead of calmly assessing who they are. All of it comes from a place of emotional reactivity, and that is understandable.

I know that despite all of the advice in this video, there will be people watching this right now who is still single despite having optimized their profile, trying many different things, experimented with different people who are not their type, worked on their attachment wounds, done therapy. Gone into my childhood. They have done more than most married people ever will, and it feels like there is nothing left for them to do other than to get lucky.

And they haven’t gotten lucky. So of course you feel emotionally reactive. If you’re that person. You are burnout from optimizing everything and trying to do everything you’re supposed to do, but you want to know the most powerful thing you can do for how much attraction you’re going to get going forward. Learning to regulate your emotions, which is something most of us were never taught how to do, look there is so much that is still available to you in your life.

The greatest tragedy is not where you are today. It’s everything you will miss in the future. If where you are today becomes the story of the rest of your life, if how you feel right now becomes this hardened truth that ends up denying you all of this opportunity that you can’t even see from where you stand right now, the problem is that our track record makes us feel like we’re in danger of ending up alone, which then leaves us with pain and uncertainty about the future, even a sense of panic.

And when that panic intersects with us liking someone, or when we feel someone we like is losing interest, it’s game over. We freak out and react in ways that wind up being disproportionate to the situation, and we sabotage things. Then we conclude having sabotage things. There’s something wrong with me and broken. Nothing is wrong with you, but our reactions to situations don’t change on their own.

We need tools, and these tools can genuinely transform your life. Because when you get control of your emotions, you get control of your life. Emotional regulation is a skill. It can be learned. And when you learn it, you stop feeling broken. You stop feeling panicked, and you become someone who attracts the right people to you, rather than someone who is at the mercy of their own worst instincts.

For those of you who are interested, these are exactly the tools that I teach at my Weekend Retreat that I am doing this October, and I just released a limited allocation of Earlybird tickets that are at discount. There’s under 30 of those available, so grab one if you are interested at MHRetreat.com and let me know in the comments what your experience of dating burnout has been.

How has it affected you emotionally? What do you want to change about that? I can’t wait to read the comments. I’ll be responding to as many as I can and as always, I will see you next week and hopefully in October in person at the Retreat. I’ll see you soon.

*This transcript was whipped up with the help of AI. While it does a pretty impressive job, it may have the occasional typo, mix-up, or moment of creative interpretation. If you spot anything that looks a little . . . adventurous . . . thanks for your patience (and your sense of humor).*